Tier 11 Mini-Preview, Ghouls vs Peacebloom, Blue Posts

Tier 11 Mini-Preview - Druids and Rogues
The latest build teach us a little more about Tier 11 sets, we already had the set bonuses, we now have an early preview of the models of the Rogue and Druid sets and the name of all the sets. Shanai already posted the preview on forums and I'll just steal it for the moment because the streaming client still hurts my workflow on a few things.

The sets are obviously unfinished, so there're a few graphical glitches and bugs.

Peacebloom Vs. Ghouls
A lot of people wondered what the "Peacebloom vs. Ghouls" achievements from the latest beta build are and we finally have an answer. Have you ever played Plants vs. Zombies? No? Cataclysm will give you a chance to fix that! A new quest was added to the game in the latest beta build, it's a brand new mini-game heavily based on Plants vs Zombies and I'm sure a lot of players will waste an insane amount of time on it.

WoWTal - Build 12984
It looks like we had a small issue with the update during the latest beta build, the Cataclysm Talent Calculator has been updated to Build 12984.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Running Wild / No Worgen Mounts
This isn't a matter of saving time. The animations still had to be made in order to make this feel cool.

It's a matter of preference and creating an immersive gameplay experience. Giving the worgen a distinct creature to ride just didn't feel right, but they can still ride other mounts if they meet the criteria. Right now we're okay with the fact that this particular race is different when it comes to mounts. We feel that makes it interesting, even if the Alliance gets less racial mounts as a result. There are plenty of mounts out there and we can always add more. (Source)

Saturday PTR/Beta Patch and bugs
We didn't have people working Saturday so we could push the patch. People were working Saturday so we decided to push the patch. Given how much work is going into this expansion right now, many changes are added to the system seven days a week. It is better that we collect those changes by creating new builds and releasing them to test the content, at this point, than it is to thoroughly bug test each new build internally. We know it can create various issues each new patch which can be sort of rough on testers, but we appreciate you working through these things with us because it's helping to shape Cataclysm to be the best expansion possible. (Source)

Stats balancing
As an almost universal rule, we don't want to solve "I don't like that stat" problems by just not making gear with that stat. The eventual result of such a design would be that all of your gear looks alike. That's a problem WoW has in general, so we like to actually get the most out of what few stats we have.

Several players could get in a state where they were hit capped in LK and then just kept getting more and more hit on higher level items. We are trying to fix that this time around in a number of ways:

1) Making all stats more attractive, rather than having the good stat vs. the garbage stat.
2) Getting rid of so many passive hit buffs, such as the draenei racial and class raid buffs.
3) Requiring higher combat ratings for additional content tiers. What hit caps you for 4.0 won't be sufficient in 4.1, so the extra budge on the 4.1 gear will be helpful.
4) Reforging. If all else fails and you just find yourself over the hit cap (or over-enriched in any other stats) you can remove part of the less desirable stat.

In all of these cases I'm talking about stats that actually show up on your gear. It's fine if mages don't care about Agi or warriors don't care about Spirit. But crit, haste and mastery should be universally desirable, and one of those should not trump the other two by being 2x more valuable. (Source)

Healing (I strongly suggest reading the whole post about healers)Medium Heals Nerf
As others have pointed out, we nerfed all of the medium heals.

Very early in beta, some healers were freaking out about running out of mana. To counter this, we made the medium heals really cost effective. We probably overdid it, because more recently, healers were able to handle almost everything with just that one heal. We want it to be part of your package, not your whole package. (Source)

Is it intended that our efficient heals only have about 20% more HPM than our big heals? Or should we expect those to be nerfed as well soon?
If healers stop casting the medium heals completely, then it's likely we nerfed them too far. Up until this change they weren't using the big heals enough.

We had the numbers set at what we thought made sense from a cost per benefit standpoint, but reality is always a little more complicated. Perhaps it was just easier using a single heal and being a B+ healer rather than having to worry about which of multiple heals to use in order to be an A+ healer. (Source)

Big Heals
The big heals get a decent amount of use, and they don't seem to run players out of mana unless the rest of the group is taking unnecessary damage (by say ignoring all the encounter mechanics because they can do so when running Heroic Nexus today).

If there's a heal we're worried about, it's the flash heals, but that's partially because so many of the talented or spec heals are also emergency heals that fill a similar niche -- things like Swiftmend, Penance and Holy Shock. (Source)

Triage
You're fortunate if you have to triage. Many healers don't today. The typical experience is to use your fastest heal on everyone who takes any damage. You may get some amount of triage by choosing who to heal, but you won't be losing that either. If you are really choosing today which of your many heals to use, then A) you're in the minority, and B) you won't really have to relearn things for Cataclysm. You'll be ahead of the game.

The Lich King game today has additional problems. Since overhealing doesn't matter, mana regen doesn't matter. Since overhealing is typical, large heals also don't matter, which means critical heals are often wasted. This makes two of the stats that appear on your gear (Spirit and crit) not attractive, which in turn makes the minigame of choosing which piece to use and how to gem and enchant them less compelling as well.

If you just really think it's fun to just cast one heal over and over with no real repercussions for doing so while stacking a single stat on all your gear, then I guess I'll just have to accept that. It's hard for us to understand why you find that satisfying though. (Source)

Healing spam
When we say "spammy" in this context, we mean using the same spell over and over. We're not talking about sitting around on your hands waiting for your mana to come back (and without the five second rule, that won't do much for you anyway).

Think of playing a healer like a real time strategy game. In the Lich King environment, your strategy is basically to crank out infantry as fast as you can and never let up. No matter what your opponent does, your job is to counter him with infantry. It doesn't matter what kinds of units he makes or whether he's going for a fast or slow buildup. Just make infantry. If your race has upgrades that affect things other than infantry, obviously they are of no use to you and you should ignore them. Cost is largely irrelevant too, since you are making one solider over and over.

In the Cataclysm environment, we want you to make a variety of units. Sometimes infantry will do the job well. Other times you may need to mix in some cavalry or siege units as well. In fact, you need to tailor what you're making to the environment. Sometimes you want cheap units. Sometimes you want expensive ones. We want you to consider your upgrades as well. Investing all of them on infantry will make less sense because you have other types of units as well. Yet you won't have enough resources so you'll have to make a decision.

That is really what we're trying to get out of the new healing model: making decisions. We think players have more fun when they are making decisions. When you make the right decision based on the information available, you feel smart. When you make the wrong decision, you feel dumb, and you might cause the rest of the group to have to work harder, or even ultimately cause a wipe.

Blizzard is investing a lot into this change... they must have better reasons then that! I want them to sell it! Front page headline "New Improved Healing System". If they can't do that, then maybe they should question all the hard work they are doing. (Source)

[...] For the most part, you'll still be constantly casting. We do want to buy a little bit of bandwidth though. Making decisions takes actual time (fractions of seconds perhaps, but still time). In the LK healing environment even if you had a variety of effective healing spells, by the time you looked at someone's bar, decided what heal would be most appropriate, and started to cast it, the dude could very well be dead.

In Cataclysm, large health pools will keep most players up for a few hits. That gives you the opportunity to decide if someone needs a little heal or a big heal, or a slow heal or a fast heal, or if they are likely to live long enough for a powerful spell to finish its cooldown. If you use the wrong spell, the target is unlikely to die immediately, but over time you'll realize that your mana has really started to dwindle and the boss has a large health bar still left.

I've said this before, but I remember when tanking back in vanilla, a priest would call out on Vent, announcing that he had a big Greater Heal being cast. Other healers might call out when they were healing someone who suddenly took a lot of unexpected damage. That kind of coordination is very hard in today's raids because you'd only get through the B in "Big heal coming," before the target would be dead.

It's possible to slow down combat enough to provide room for decision making and communication without going to the extreme where healers are doing nothing for large stretches of time because they are so paranoid about running out of mana if they cast a heal that isn't at 100% efficiency or doesn't save a life at that moment. (Source)

Healer mana efficiency in solo
Keep in mind that we're not super concerned with healer mana efficiency when not in a group. Fights are pretty short when you're solo and there are a lot of breaks. What I'm getting at is we're not super concerned with how you perform when self-buffed, so long as you're functional. We're more concerned with how you perform when group buffed, since all of the most rewarding endgame content requires groups. (Source)

Val'anyr competitive @ LVL 85?
Let's put it this way... if it is competitive at level 85, it won't be for long. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Runic Empowerment
We think Runic Empowerment is an important mechanic because without it, the rotation becomes very predictable perhaps even metronome-like. We are trying to make sure all specs have some random mechanics so that they need to react to what happens instead of just pressing the same buttons over and over as fast as they can. Some players react badly to random mechanics because they make the rotations less predictable and therefore more challenging to manage. That's the entire point.

However, coming out of LK, Frost had a more random rotation that was more about priorities than set rotations, and Unholy was the opposite. This let players gravitate towards the play style they preferred and made the specs feel more different when you swapped from one for the other (more than just replacing Frost damage with Shadow damage). We are working on an Unholy talent that will essentially turn off the Runic Empowerment system in place of something more predictable, like the runes just refreshing more quickly. Ideally the talent would be optional, so that Unholy DKs could stick with Runic Empowerment if they prefer it. It will still require you to keep on your toes a little bit rather than letting you know for certainty what buttons you will be hitting at second 148 a battle. (Source)

Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Replenishment on Lifebloom
We gave Replenishment to Restoration because we took it away from Survival hunters. It didn't make a lot of sense for a non-mana class to offer mana. We want to make sure Replenishment is easily available, though to be fair it is about half as effective as it was in Lich King. (Source)

We're happy with Heavy Repercussions. It lets you use a defensive cooldown offensively when you don't need it defensively.

I'm not sure it makes sense for Heroic Leap to hit harder than anything else a Prot warrior could do. It might make you want to do things like move out of melee and leap back in all the time. It might make you use a utility ability only for dps. (I don't think that's the same thing as Shield Block, because you're not literally giving up its defensive uses with Heavy Repercussions.) (Source)

The Ethereal feelings fits good, it is most likely meant to fit the arabic Skywall theme, both because of the tiers name, and that the ethereals are resembeling the Arabic.http://www.wowwiki.com/Ethereal

"We feel that makes it interesting, even if the Alliance gets less racial mounts as a result."

you have to laugh, i mean this is the blizzard that within the last 3 years has destroyed everything bar looks that make the horde and alliance different. From companion pets, mounts to the shaman/paladin. Come on they even added mounts to the horde so we'd have the same number. The "plenty of mounts" seems very excusey like the fact they can't do PUG rated BGs but all the tools are there, which ghostcrawler actually admitted on serveral occassions even contadicting himself at one point. Seriously does Blizzards matchmaking tool from patch 2.1 exist? or is it made up?

Yet now, now they're okay with it... i dunno... i miss the distintive feel to be honest. Yes we got a pet Faerie Dragons cue much, pardon the pun, QQ'ing from the horde. Hell look at the loremaster and how that changed now we're both 700. i mean... blizzard says and does one thing, changes it's mind and reverts it more times than you can say flying space goats are actually eredar.

i hope they give alliance mounts, or at least the worgen faction gets something in the way of mounts. Otherwise it's just stupid... why can't hunters train feral worgens then.. damnit i wanna be a mount with a pet worgen with the name "mywife". Lore wise having a pet worgen makes more sense [they are essentially beasts who are able to take simple comands as both the lore and quests state) than running as fast as a horse.